Sanctions (EU Exit) (Miscellaneous Amendments) (No. 2) Regulations 2022

Stella Creasy Excerpts

Tuesday 11th October 2022 General Committees

[Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship this afternoon, Mr Hosie. I fully associate myself with the comments of Labour’s Front-Bench spokesman, my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff South and Penarth, on the importance of taking action on the sanctions regime.

I have a few simple questions for the Minister about the implementation of these sanctions. He will be aware that many of us have a massive interest in how, now that we have left the European Union, new regimes and forms of collaboration are enacted. As my Front-Bench colleague said, we want to see the regime work, and I hope that the Minister takes my questions in that spirit. However, there are questions, and I can see that Conservative Members also have concerns about how the measures will work.

Clearly, we previously relied on working across Europe on sanctions issues. We have talked before in this House about how assets are transferred across Europe, and how people whom we want to sanction work across different countries. Having left the EU provisions that enabled such sanctions to be enacted, it is right to introduce the regulations: they deal with a gap in our proposals on how to enact sanctions. However, the regulations are a unilateral piece of legislation. My first, very simple question for the Minister is whether he can confirm and reassure us that we will continue to get the information that we need from the European Union about those individuals to make sure that sanctions are effective? We can obviously make that commitment to information sharing ourselves. It would be helpful to hear about his conversations with the European Union and our European counterparts on this issue. It is obviously a very apposite issue at the moment when it comes to Russia and Belarus, particularly when there might not be as much of a united front as we may wish.

Secondly, and more prosaically, the regulations, as the Minister said, bring in a new power for public authorities to participate in the process. Will the Minister tell us a little more about that? In particular, the power is provisional. The regulations state that public authorities “may” disclose information. The number of public bodies that could disclose information is quite high: for example, any police officer could. Would he clarify whether that means, say, a police constable? Have police constables been given information about how they might be expected to operate under this piece of legislation? The regulations refer to

“any other person exercising functions of a public nature”.

Might we, as Members of Parliament, be required or expected to provide information under the legislation? Of course, most critically for all of us who want the sanctions to be effective—obviously colleagues on both sides of the House might have concerns about what information people might know—what happens if Members of Parliament, police constables or indeed any of these bodies do not co-operate?

As I said, the regulations say that they “may disclose information”, but they are not required to do so. Will he clarify what would happen if somebody did not disclose information? Within that environment, what monitoring will there will be of those who disclose information and, perhaps, those who refuse to do so, so that we can review how the sanctions are working? Again, it is one thing for us unilaterally to decide that we must have an operative sanction regime, but it is another thing if we do not actually know who is taking part in it and where there might be further blockages to it being effective.

The Minister talks about it being important to introduce the regulations because they would correct acronyms, for example, in legislation; there had been drafting errors—although I am pleased to see that they are not of the type that we saw in the Belgium legislation, where an entire duck soup recipe was added into legislation. But it does rather bring up one of the wider challenges, does it not, when it comes to translating EU legislation into UK law? There is so much that we were so dependent on to make our regimes effective that we have to be sure that it is done well.

Will the Minister update us on what has been happening in the three years since the legislation came in, in terms of the sanctions and the information gathering activity, when we have not had these powers? Given that we have a major piece of legislation being introduced to this House that will dispense with all forms of retained EU legislation, can he be confident that it will not affect our ability either to do that information sharing or to be able to effect these sanctions? Would he recognise that, if we are making drafting errors that require a statutory instrument to be introduced, there is a concern that any future legislation that covers translating into UK legislation does not also miss items?

A big bang approach, which is what we are going to see with this Brexit retained law legislation, may well bring up some of the problems that the sanctions legislation and this SI are trying to correct. Is he confident that there is not anything we will miss out once we have dealt with this SI? I very much hope this SI is will be effective, but I hope he will explain, in the spirit of understanding, how it will operate in person and what it might mean, not just for us as Members of Parliament, but for the police, local authority officers and maybe traffic wardens who might be asked to disclose information? It is helpful for Parliament to set out its intent now, whether it is misspelt or not.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stella Creasy]

That is helpful to hear. Will the Minister clarify something? New section 49A, for example, mentions “any police officer”, “any local authority” and “any other person exercising functions of a public nature”.

Will he clarify what level, and will there be training provided? It is quite a big request to make of a police constable to share information. Equally, this will clearly be tested because it comes across other disclosure rules. For example, there are clear guidelines about supervising officers, which do not seem to be in this legislation. What protection will there be for a police constable, for example, maybe from prosecution or censure under general data protection regulation, without clarity as to who makes the decision on what information can be disclosed, and if it is a permissive, rather than mandatory, requirement?

[Leo Docherty]

I think it is the other way around and that this will actually afford greater protection because it will make things clearer and ensure that there is no risk of GDPR being used so that a certain individual finds themselves in a regrettable circumstance. I think it will clarify. Under this legislation, the public authorities that are exposed to these sorts of issues will be required to conduct that sort of training, and they will be responsible, as we would expect.

The hon. Lady then went on to a mischievous digression, because she sought to use the unfortunate inclusion of inaccurate acronyms as a means of shaking our confidence in not just this legislation but other new legislation as we tidy up our statute following our exit from the EU. I can say that there is no duck soup in this legislation or any other. Clearly drafting errors happen in legislation; it is the way that the world works, unfortunately, but we are, as parliamentarians, amenable and available to redraft and improve, as we are doing this afternoon. Therefore, in answer to the hon. Lady’s question, yes, I am confident not only that this piece of legislation is correct and in good order, but that the vast body of legislation that will flow from our leaving the EU will also be similarly effective and accurate. On that note, I again commend the instrument to the Committee.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That the Committee has considered the Sanctions (EU Exit) (Miscellaneous Amendments) (No. 2) Regulations 2022 (SI. 2022, No. 818).